Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday December 06, 2012 @09:20PM
from the watch-what-you-say dept.

alexander_686 writes "The SEC is investigating Netflix CEO Reed Hastings over one of his Facebook postings. The agency is questioning his July 1 Facebook posting, seen by 200,000 followers, in which he said customers watched 'over 1 billion hours' of videos on Netflix in June. He had previously posted on his company blog that members were viewing 'nearly a billion hours per month.' From the article: '“We think the fact of 1 billion hours of viewing in June was not ‘material’ to investors, and we had blogged a few weeks before that we were serving nearly 1 billion hours per month,” Hastings said in the filing today. “We remain optimistic this can be cleared up quickly through the SEC’s review process.”'"

Because analysts see stuff like this and make assumptions about the number of customers, costs in terms of bandwidth and licensing, etc. that feed into the stock price. If a CEO makes a claim like this, it has all sorts of repercussions on how wall street views the stock and what it's worth.

Think of it this way, if I say AMD processors are awesome it's not a big deal. If the CEO of Dell says it, it might indicate a shift to more AMD units which in turn could affect the ability of Dell to sell X computers as some customers don't like AMD, costs they may face, redesigns of products (new motherboards or whatever), customer perception, etc. Investors read into all sorts of things.

Regulation Fair Disclosure requires that when a company discloses information to investors, that its able reach all investors at the same time. If an investor was not a fan of Netflix, they would not have the opportunity to receive the information.

This is one of the reasons why companies hold conference calls, issue press releases, etc regarding information pertinent to an investor, so that it's disclosed fairly to everyone.

The question here is his posting on facebook disclosing a fact that would be material to investors? And does him previously posting about it on a public blog count as previous disclosure. IMHO, much ado about nothing.

You don't have to speculate. Political contributions -- at least to groups affiliated with candidates and parties -- are a matter of public record.

As it happens, Reed Hastings donated a lot of money, all of it to Democrats. So, either the Republicans are behind this despite not having control of the White House, or your theory should have been researched a little more carefully.